12/16/2019

Overview

Airbnb, which started its service in 2008, was an unconventional accommodation rental service that focused on allowing travelers to live like locals with the concept of renting my home or my room.

As one of the travel buffs who love to travel, I use Airbnb a lot even more than Hotel services these days. And, I love that I can experience the traveling area as a resident, not as a tourist, through the Airbnb platform.

Throughout the project, I look for investigating and proving a few research questions, such as “how are the airbnb listings in Boston area diffrent from the Airbnb listings in other regions.”

The data I use for the project is collected from the site ‘Inside Airbnb’ http://insideairbnb.com/get-the-data.html, which provides more detailed Airbnb data than most of the other opensource Airbnb data websites does, such as Kaggle and Tomslee.

For this project, I compare Airbnb listings in Boston with Airbnb listings in three different regions: New York city, Los Angeles and Hawaii.

Exploratory Data Analysis

Distribution of the listings in Boston, New York City, Los Angeles, and Hawaii.

  • Starts EDA by making plots for the data.

Figure 1.1 (Boston)

It shows that the most number of airbnb listing type in boston is Entire home/apt. And, the distribution of the listings over price is rightly skewed.

Figure 1.2 (NYC)

This plot clearly shows that the median or the average prices of three different types of Airbnb listings in New York City are significantly different from each other.

Figure 1.3 (LA)

The distribution of the airbnb listings over price in LA seems similar to that of New York City.

Figure 1.4 (Hawaii)

From this plot, I can infer that the overall price of Entire/apt is significantly higher than other two types of Airbnb room in Hawaii.

Figure 1.5 (combined)

By just looking at this plot, I can tell that the overall number of listings in Boston is not significant compared to the other cities.

And, the proportion of shared room from the total Airbnb listings in NYC is larger than any other cities in this group.

What else the number of reviews for the listings can tell related to the price?

Figure 2.1 (Boston)

Figure 2.2 (New York city)

Figure 2.3 (Los Angeles)

Figure 2.4 (Hawaii)

Figure 2.5 (combined)

Figure 2.5 (combined)

-For all of the cities, the price with the most number of reviews is approximately \(exp(5)=148.4132\).

-Therefore, the most popular Airbnb listings are roughly around $148.41 per day in all four cities.

Most crowded neighborhoods with Airbnb listings

  • Check which neighborhood has the largest number of Airbnb listings among Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Hawaii.

  • Create tables and plots to check the data better.

Neighborhoods with the most number of Airbnb listings (Boston)

Neighborhood Count
Dorchester 371
Downtown 318
Jamaica Plain 259
South End 270

Neighborhoods with the most number of Airbnb listings (Hawaii)

Neighborhood Count
Kihei-Makena 3768
Lahaina 3394
North Kona 2241
Primary Urban Center 4677

Neighborhoods with the most number of Airbnb listings (New York)

Neighborhood Count
Bedford-Stuyvesant 3974
Bushwick 2504
Harlem 2746
Hell’s Kitchen 2052
Williamsburg 3936

Neighborhoods with the most number of Airbnb listings (Los Angeles)

Neighborhood Count
Downtown 1486
Hollywood 2086
Long Beach 1773
Santa Monica 1254
Venice 2108

Figure 3

Number of Airbnb listings (BOS, NYC, LA, HAWA)

Figure 3

Number of Airbnb listings (BOS, NYC, LA, HAWA)

  • From the plots, I can see how Airbnb listings are distributed over the neighborhoods in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Hawaii.

  • For Boston, most of the Airbnb listings are crowded in Dorchester, Downtown, and South End. Also, the Primary Urban Center in Hawaii has the most number of Airbnb listings.

Figure 4

Number of Airbnb reviews over the neighborhoods

Figure 4

Number of Airbnb reviews over the neighborhoods

  • It can be infered from the plot that the higher number of reviews the neighborhood has, the more the neighborhood is popular among the tourists.

Text Analysis

Figure 5.1 Wordcloud

the overall Airbnb reviews in Boston

Figure 5.2 Wordcloud

the overall Airbnb reviews in New York City

Figure 5.3 Wordcloud

the overall Airbnb reviews in Los Angeles

Figure 5.4 Wordcloud

the overall Airbnb reviews in Hawaii

Mapping

Mapping with shiny

  • The interactive map for Airbnb listings in Boston is included in the shiny app.

End.